01/09/2016
The Infamous Abbey
This place.
The memories.
And where it is now in my conscience.
As someone who experienced the years of hooliganism as a teenager in Cambridge, this was a place, and area, a part of the city, on the east side, to avoid.
The infamous days of street fights around the Abbey, between Cambridge United fans and their Millwall counterparts.
Names like the General.
Kids at Coleridge, the rough comprehensive I spent 3 years, talked about the General almost in legendary terms.
He went to prison, you know.
And there actually is an Abbey, and it sits quietly in a meadow, surrounded by concrete suburbia, with its flyovers and combustion engines, and strip malls. .
A stone's throw away from the stadium.
Those days are safely behind me. I now embrace this side of Cambridge, along with a lot of Cambridge, in new lights, each time I am back.
This time, it's with a new camera, and its power to change photos into art.
I can turn what was and still is considered the mundane, the mediocre, into a comic theatre.
I meander the streets and lanes and alleys of Cambridge, like a talent scout looking for characters for my next production.
I'm in that zone.
It may be then, but not when, but always now and Zen.
A process that keeps me present and aware.
Magic moment after magic moment.
